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Committee Against Torture

UN body of human rights experts

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 13, 2026
Entity authorityQ1709362 ↗
Source-derived summary

The Committee Against Torture (CAT) is a treaty body of human rights experts that monitors implementation of the United Nations Convention against Torture by state parties. The committee is one of eight UN-linked human rights treaty bodies. All state parties are obliged under the convention to submit regular reports to the CAT on how rights are being implemented. Upon ratifying the convention, states must submit a report within one year, after which they are obliged to report every four years. The committee examines each report and addresses its concerns and recommendations to the state party in the form of "concluding observations." Under certain circumstances, the CAT may consider complaints or communications from individuals claiming that their rights under the convention have been violated.

The CAT usually meets in April/May and November each year in Geneva. Members are elected to four-year terms by state parties and can be re-elected if nominated.

Tasks and activities

Ratifications

In their ratification of the agreement, the states had to expressly agree to the state and individual complaints procedure, the examination procedure and the intern. The court had to expressly refuse them if they did not agree, such as, for example, Poland.

None of these states has created the independent investigation and complaints office, which means that there is no effective remedy for torture.

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “Committee Against Torture” as uN body of human rights experts. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Committee, Against and Torture.

Editorial reviewA dependable orientation record for establishing vocabulary, names and a first evidence trail. The current 218-word lead offers orientation but no explicit four-digit date, so chronology should not be assumed. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1987-01-01. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Committee, Against and Torture providing the first useful test.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Committee Against Torture”, the useful work is to connect “uN body of human rights experts” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.

Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1709362. VIAF identifies the subject as 157746212. The Library of Congress control number is no90006957. 2 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Committee Against Torture” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.